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11:21 AM, Sunday October 8th 2023

Hello Scopov, thank you for replying with your revisions.

Not to worry, the reason I asked you to only work on one construction on a given day was to help to put you a mindset to invest as much time as is required into each one, and it looks like that worked.

These are moving in the right direction, I'll recap the main points from my initial critique to credit you for things that have improved and point out a couple of places where there is scope for further growth.

  • You've avoided cutting back inside forms you have already drawn and used the outer line of your ellipses as the basis for your constructions, which helps to maintain their solidity, nice one.

  • You're sticking more closely to simple sausage forms for your leg armatures, and are using additional forms to build bulk and complexity where needed, good job. You're also drawing complete 3D forms for all your feet, well done.

  • You've done a great job wrapping the majority of your additional masses around the existing structures in a way that feels convincing, and helps to reinforce the illusion that your constructions are 3D. There are a couple of spots, such as on the hind legs of your boar, where you've pressed an inward curve into your additional masses where they are exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to cause such complexity. This unexplained complexity can lead to the masses feeling a little bit flat. Instead, we can mimic the inward curve by layering masses, allowing each one to stay simpler where it is exposed to fresh air. You can see examples of this with masses 4,5,6,7 on the bear draw over from your initial submission.

  • Head construction is a significant improvement. I'm seeing a concerted effort to fit all the pieces of your head constructions together like a 3D puzzle, without leaving any arbitrary gaps. Something that I think will help you with your efforts here is to stick with the pentagonal (five-sided) eye socket shape shown in the informal head demo, as your horses and boar have rectangular (four-sided) eye sockets, which doesn't quite provide the convenient diagonal edge to wedge the base of the muzzle against and flat top to rest the brow/forehead plane against. This was something I previously made a point of showing you here and here I've made a step by step redraw of your horse head for you. If these steps are confusing to you, please let me know and I'll find a way to make things clearer for you. Otherwise, I'll just assume that the point about the specific shape of the eye sockets got forgotten (the critique was quite dense, and there were a lot of points to cover) and I'll leave you to apply this to your practice independently in your own time.

Anyway, good work overall, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is up next, best of luck.

Next Steps:

250 Cylinder Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:34 PM, Tuesday October 10th 2023

Hey Dio, thanks for great feedback again. Regarding the eyes having 5 side, I feel bad saying this, because you already gave me so much material to explain this, but I have to admit, I still struggle to comprehend it. The reason I gave some of these constructions 4 sided eye planes is because I thought it would work best for that specific reference. I can see on the finished pieces that that was not the case, since the ostriche head is probably that best construction and I used 5 sides for that one, so I don't necessarily need convincing that 4 sides don't work as well as 5, but I think it would help me see that in the reference better if you try to explain it again. Sorry if I'm being difficult, but you know how it is - if I don't ask now, it might grow to a bigger problem later :P.

P.S. This is completely unrelated and probably a question for the community, so you don't have to answer, but out of curiosity; I noticed something that seems strange to me and I was wondering if this is normal or maybe there is an obvious reason for it. When I was trying to redraw the same animals as I did before the feedback, but implementing the feedback you gave me, I found it almost impossible to do. All my attempts somehow came out way worse than the initial ones. Then I did some from new references and you saw that there was a noticeable improvement. I found it odd that I seemingly got worse when trying to work on same subjects, but when trying new ones, I felt like I could apply the methods much more easily and better. Is this something that others experience too, or am I freak? xD.

12:48 PM, Wednesday October 11th 2023
edited at 1:05 PM, Oct 11th 2023

Hello Scopov, no problem, I'd much rather you ask for clarification than walk away from the lesson confused.

I totally get where you're coming from. Having done some studies of human skulls, I'd agree that the eye sockets are fairly rectangular (for humans, at least, I can't speak for all the variety of animal skulls). Keep in mind that the construction methods we teach at Drawabox aren't necessarily anatomically correct, but are tools to help students develop their spatial reasoning skills.

The pentagonal eye sockets used in the informal head demo method aren't perhaps going to be something directly observed, but that pentagonal shape is really useful for wedging the base of the muzzle and forehead plane against. This is considerably more awkward with rectangular eye sockets as shown here. This is all part of the exercise Uncomfortable wants students to go through when constructing heads- transforming the round cranial ball into a series of planes. I hope that shows why the pentagonal shape is helpful, even though it may not be anatomically accurate.

As for your other question. I don't know if your attempts at redoing your constructions were objectively worse, but I can tell you from my own experiences that I often find redrawing the same reference frustrating as I feel like I should be able to learn from the first attempt and do better, which doesn't always happen. So I would say that your experiences are normal, though I'd encourage you to ask about it over on Discord to hear a wider variety of other students' experiences, and open up a discussion on why people think it happens.

edited at 1:05 PM, Oct 11th 2023
7:00 PM, Wednesday October 11th 2023

Ahh yes, this explanation does actually make sense. Looking at my less successful constructions with rectangular eye sockets, there was an awkward gap because of the shape of the muzzle and trying to fill it messed up a lot. That diagram is great, thanks! :D.

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Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.

As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.

Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).

Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.

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